[ankhmoop]

How can one effectively argue against an entirely subjective judgment of difficulty in terms of dealing with a type system?

Anecdotally, I find that leveraging functional language programming features coupled with type inference and polymorphism leads to considerable productivity gains as code correctness can be ensured through judicious use of types -- without requiring extensive testing or programmer effort -- while excess verbosity can be eliminated through the use of FP features such as type-safe anonymous functions, currying, etc.

[ansin]

How do you deal with excess verbosity in C#? I know this is a separate argument from the monkey patching issue but for me the conciseness and elegance of the Ruby syntax versus C# is the primary reason to choose Ruby.

[ankhmoop]

Hopefully a user of C# will chime in -- I've spent very little time with it, and only recently evaluated C#'s extension mechanism for the purpose of comparing it against other language's implementations.

That said, elegant and concise syntax does not require eschewing an internally consistent, fully specified type system -- the two are not incompatible, as demonstrated (subjectively) -- by many existing FP languages. I argue that elegance/conciseness requires either FP language features and advanced type system, or abandonment of rigorous typing.

[SamReidHughes_]

Which version of C# are you thinking of?

In C# 3, the verbosity level is much less than in C# 2, where it's slightly less than C# 1.

I don't see where Ruby syntax is particularly more concise than C# 3's.

Well, let me clarify "particularly". I don't find myself feeling like I'm suffering under C#'s syntax, relative to Haskell's. It has about the same amount of syntactic overhead: writing types for method parameters, and when defining data structures. Occasionally I have to explicitly write a type parameter to a function.

[ansin]

"I don't see where Ruby syntax is particularly more concise than C# 3's."

1.upto(10).each{|x| print x}

I'm curious - how would you print 1 through 10 in C# 3 by comparison?

[namelessmike]

C# 3:

  (1).UpTo(10).ForEach(x => Console.WriteLine(x));

Of course, "UpTo" requires first extending int, which is trivial:

  public static class IntExtensions {
      public static List<int> UpTo(this int start, int end) {
          var range = new List<int>();
          for(int i = start; i < end; i++) {
              range.Add(i);
          }
          return range;
      }
  }

[_pius]

That's cool and all, but I think being able to do this natively in Ruby wins:

  p *1..10

Edit: you may need to do a "require 'pp'" first.

[ankhmoop]

One way to do this in Scala:

  def print[T] (value:T) = System.out.println(value)
  1.until(10).foreach(x => print x)

This is a fairly uninteresting example, however. Something more interesting would be, for instance, the use of structural types to implement type-checked duck typing.

Scala example:

  // Declare a structural type for any class implementing close()
  type Closable = {def close(): Any}
  
  // Executes the provided function with the given
  // closable generator, creating a new instance which
  // will then be closed on completion. The provided
  // function's value will be returned.
  def withClosable[T, C <: Closable] (c: => C) (f: (C) => T) = {
    val closable = c
    try {
      f(closable)
    } finally {
      closable.close
    }
  }
  
  // Example usage
  def usage = {
    val updated = withClosable(db.openConnection) { conn =>
      conn.update("INSERT INTO example VALUES (...")
    }
    System.out.println("Rows updated: " + updated)
  }

This could be compared with Python's new 'with' syntax.

[henning]

Since there's plenty of shitting on Scala going on, I'd like to point out that the Scala equivalent of that is:

    1 to 10 foreach println

Which seems more concise than the equivalent Ruby to me. Feh.

[mkramlich]

in Python:

    for i in range(1,11): print i

Python FTW? ;)

[erlanger]

I still find this clearer:

  for x in range(1, 10): print x

[lunchbox]

I'm nitpicking, but your range should be range(1,11).

[erlanger]

Every nit picked is valuable :)

[ansin]

Not so different in Ruby:

for x in 1..10; print x end

[erlanger]

Yes, but we all know that Ruby is the haven of Devils!!